Microsoft has found a way of very sneakily making money out of users who upgrade to Windows 10. The good news is that it has brought back Solitaire but unless you want up to 30 seconds of advertising, you'll have to pay $9.99 a year to "upgrade" Solitaire to "Premium Edition". I wonder what other money-making opportunities are lurking within this bloatware.
All this, sounds like too much hassle for something that hasn't been tried and tested yet, and I don't know what disguised security implications it will bring. I had the offer for a free upgrade, and I will gladly let is pass, as I find windows 7 more than adequate for my simple needs. It has been instructive, to say the least, reading up, what you more tech-savy guys have sofar written about it. Thanks for that.
Windows 10 is a slick fast very very nice operating system with a lot of genuine improvements over Windows 7 and which has pretty much fixed the stupid UI choices forced on the devs by Balmer and others. Calling it bloatware is doing it a disservice, it is a complex layered operating system that twenty years on can still run pretty much anything that is not 16bit, it is a pretty dammed impressive feat of software engineering.
I'm not trying to be at all argumentative, Oss, but could you please tell me what its (claimed) improvements are over Windows 7. For me, the "milestone" classics are/were NT3.5, Windows XP and to a lesser extent, Windows 7. Any operating system that needs over a gigabyte of memory for itself is bloated and I honestly think it's time Microsoft redesigned the next version from scratch.
Microsoft have more than one research project on the go for brand new 'from scratch' operating systems, but the simple fact is that if they released a 'from scratch' OS and SDK that would be the end of them, all those billions of man hours that have gone into the development of software that runs the worlds businesses, supply chains and so on, all gone. Windows 10 improvements, well Edge has been good enough that I have no desire to install Google Chrome, Chrome in my view has become bloated and a resource hog, it is a serious battery drain these days. Also Edge is not yet finished it is still a work in progress. Cortana is a genuinely useful tool and an interesting way to refocus ones idea's on 'search', I actually have found myself happy with the search results from Bing via using Cortana, again I've not used Google since I started with Windows 10 although I expect I will still use Google at some point. Cortana has the capacity to actually pull users away from the browser omnibox which would be a huge achievement for Microsoft. Unification of local search and internet search actually works well in Windows 10. Virtual desktops finally baked into the OS, yes they have always been there but always needed either power tools or third party apps to access them. There will be many more subtle improvements, it is clearly an evolution of 7 but it comes with no greater resource requirements to run it which is in part why I think the term 'bloatware' really does not apply, there is no bloat that I can see compared to Windows 7 and 7 was actually cleaner and leaner than the somewhat bloated Vista. More to the point are the huge innovations that are taking place in the .Net platform since they open sourced it, the development platform changes that are happing in .Net right now are a revolution.
It is the last name change, yes, but far from the last version, it does not imply that at some point a brand new OS will replace it.
The free upgrade is a perpetual licence and the support lifetime I think is initially 5 years with extension up to 10 years, however that info is targeted at Enterprise edition customers who will have the ability to opt out of Windows updates, the reason they can opt out is simply that businesses need a stable non changing controlled platform where they can roll out their in house applications, or their chosen vendor's ERP systems. They are the ones that are being told that a specific version of Windows will have a 5 year life with end of life support in 10 years, the rest of us are on a perpetual upgrade cycle from now on. Now that might be a good thing or a bad thing, take Google Chrome, you wake up one day and find that BSkyB's viewing apps now no longer work because Google dropped support for certain types of browser plugin, (Silverlight in this case) and what do BSkyB say, well they say use Internet Explorer when you want to use our services, apparently they have no plans to move from Silverlight probably because of the very powerful DRM features in Silverlight. Essentially from now on Windows which is a complete OS will behave like Chrome the browser in that there will never be a new version but it will keep changing all the time.
Thank you very much, Oss I agree with you about the Chrome browser and I'd level the same criticism at Firefox too. That Microsoft is replacing IE will not come as welcome news to HSBC Philippines customers. It's newly revamped web site refuses to work with any browser other than IE - and IE v8 as a minimum. When I told my account manager that IE was being discontinued, her reply was not to upgrade to Windows 10 and thus lose IE! HSBC has apparently ceased to practice joined-up thinking as its UK web site doesn't work with IE! I do like Windows 7 - I managed to miss Vista completely and didn't do Win 8 either - so I very much doubt that I will be upgrading any time soon, if at all (I still have XP powering my Samsung Notebook). It's certainly about time that Windows support virtual desktops properly but it's not enough of an incentive for me to upgrade. Dexpot does the same job brilliantly (and it's written in VB6 would you believe!!)
Oh and the Action Centre that they have added (WIN + A shortcut) is pretty nice and for the first time I find myself liking the built in Universal apps like the Calendar and so on, the overall look is very nice too.
You don't lose IE 11 in Windows 10 it is still there, it has to be as there are some things that Edge will never support so IE is needed for legacy support, interestingly when you access something that Edge can't do it tells you and launches you into IE 11 at the correct place and in the correct security context.
One point, anyone using a laptop that employs switchable graphics say the ATI Radeon 5000 and 6000 series cards needs to be careful as you will probably find that it no longer switches unless you explicitly set discrete or integrated graphics in the BIOS. That means that you could get stuck in discrete mode and find that your battery life is now half what it used to be, it is a particular problem when you use a docking station to turn a laptop into a full desktop PC as most docking stations will only support the DVI output if the discrete GPU chip is active.
As I understand it, the same binary is also used in Windows mobile phones, so very impressive. Does that mean that updates to Mobile phones come straight from Microsoft or is it still like Android, where each mobile phone manufacturer pushes out its own updates? I am thinking of that latest and most serious MMS bug on Android mobiles that may take months to push out, even to flagship devices and probably not at all on pre Android 4.4 devices.
It's the same codebase but compiled and linked via a different hardware abstraction layer, it's not possible for it to be the same binary on a phone as the Intel x86 instruction set is completely different to the ARM processor instruction set. Also they really mean that the Kernel is the same or similar, most phones haven't got the space for full blown windows, it is also important to note that Intel x86 desktop legacy apps will never run on a phone. What will run are the exact same native Universal apps written to take advantage of .Net core, these will run unchanged on Windows Phone, Windows Tablet, Windows Desktop and XBox and on Holo lens, additionally .Net core is what will allow these same apps to reach out to Android and iOS with minimal changes. Microsoft just recently released a version of Office that runs perfectly on an Android tablet, and it is pretty amazing, this same suite runs as Native Windows Universal apps on Windows 10, phone, tablet and desktop. It is this aspect that is revolutionary for Microsoft and it is quite bold of them to have opened up .Net to all these other markets. The toolset in .Net is way better than anything else out there, and they are hoping that a lot of those devs that went to other languages to be able to write on Android and iOS will come back because honestly a lot of them loved C# and .Net. Another example of their new found openness is Visual Studio Code, a simplified development environment that can run on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows and which can open full Visual Studio projects on all of those platforms and which provides code intellisense and a full editor platform for developers. Really quite remarkable where they are going now, even if it is a bit overdue Oh and Visual Studio community edition is to all intents and purposes the same as Visual Studio Professional, but the big difference is that it is free and not only that I am allowed to develop commercial applications to sell for profit using the community edition. Indeed for a small dev team with up to 5 devs they can use Visual Studio 2015 for free to create applications to sell for profit. Finally they have remembered the people who made Windows great in the first place, it was always all about the devs, guys like me
Initially updates will still come from the phone networks but my understanding is that Microsoft will take responsibility for rolling out updates at a later stage. Also Microsoft are putting some effort into providing ROM images for Android phones so that people can install Windows on their Android phone instead of Android
Ahh enterprise is > 150 PC's / users or < 1 million US dollars revenue. That counts me out, or my company at least Sounds great though
